Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 04 August 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 04 August 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
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Presented without comment: this utter crankery about hacking the Matrix (HN)
Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity [37-39] research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric paths such as:, meditation [40], psychedelics (DMT [41-43], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD) [44, 45], dreams [46], magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide [47], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel [48], or religion.
Among the things they've already tried are torture, touching grass, and declining all cookies:
Unethical behavior, such as torture, doesn’t cause suffering reducing interventions from the simulators.
Breaking out of your routine, such as by suddenly traveling to a new location [199], doesn’t result in unexpected observations.
Saying "I no longer consent to being in a simulation" [200].
This idiocy has been patiently submitted 3 times before but finally broke containment
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theseedsofscience.org
Saying “I no longer consent to being in a simulation”
Time to create a big mindfuck for the Rationalists. First have an active account on EA/LW and actively participate. Post this research as a talking point. Then leave one message 'lol just to be sure: I no longer consent to being in a simulation'. And then never touch that account + any related accounts ever again.
There's a great sneer-novel about simulationists called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin.
The villains of the story are a group of TESCREAL stand-ins who style themselves as the "Simmurai." They have the goal of breaking the "simulation" just the same as the authors of the (hilarious) paper you've shared. They have a very similar tone, which to my ears sounds like a serial killer winding themselves up to do the deed. The big twist is that the Simmurai have been unwittingly suborned by a Lovecraftian horror that has bent their plan to its own ends. The only thing standing in their way is a small group of working class millenials from Ohio, who get tangled up in the story because they once shot up some space drugs in a Denny's parking lot and can therefore see the true nature of the universe (maybe).
Of course one of the first things they try is torture, because "maybe the simulationists aren't as big of bastards as we are" is a reasonable hypothesis to test and not a reason to be locked up.
Also since we're messing with absurd thought experiments, I'd like to propose that when they declined consent the simulationists could actually just disable the part of that agent with a subjective personal experience, making them a P-zombie in the David Chalmers tradition. As such, they were no longer part of the simulation without adversely affecting any other aspect of it.
Is this stupid? Obviously, but let's be honest: it's probably less stupid than at least half of the actual paper.
In another episode of "anyone can upload a PDF and call it a paper mate, they don't even check"...
What the hell is "Seeds of Science"? Is that some weird arxiv thingy that also gives you a logo at the top?
I wanted to sneer at this, but it very quickly outgrew a Stubsack comment, so, enjoy, this is what you made me do